A Smart Set of One

By Christopher Hitchens

Published: November 17, 2002

THE SKEPTIC

A Life of H. L. Mencken.

By Terry Teachout.

Illustrated. 410 pp. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers. $29.95.

''One might say of Mencken,'' remarks his latest biographer, Terry Teachout, ''as was once said of Paul de Man, the deconstructionist who in his youth published anti-Semitic articles in pro-Nazi publications, that 'he was the only man who ever looked into the abyss and came away smiling.' '' I suppose that perhaps one might. But in that case de Man would not be the only such person. And nor indeed would Mencken. One thing one learns from the study of his career is that the great H. L. Mencken took considerable care to avoid abysses of any kind. Except for his coverage of political conventions and his attendance at the Scopes trial in Tennessee, he seldom left his native Baltimore. Except for a couple of trips to Europe, partly motivated by his tribal feeling for Germany in its 20th-century difficulties, he barely quit the shores of the United States. His life was cautious, fussy, routine, domestic and self-centered.

Yet did not Diogenes the Cynic prefer to stay in one barrel, and Immanuel Kant confine himself to Königsberg? For the best part of two decades, Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was the sharpest cynic and the most skillful purveyor of German philosophy that this culture has produced. Not unlike his hero Mark Twain, he fulfilled the unofficial office of a one-man opposition. Mencken resembled Twain in his contempt for religion and his distrust (to put it no higher) of foreign adventurism and political hubris. He was also, like Twain, a tremendous humorist and satirist and even entertainer. But there was a largeness and humanity to the laconic Samuel L. Clemens that was crucially absent in the Sage of Baltimore, and ''The Skeptic'' reminds one of that vital discrepancy.

Teachout opens his biography on Dec. 7, 1934, with a fascinating incident. Every year in Washington there is a grisly evening known as the Gridiron Club dinner. It rivals other such soirees in raising the question: which is the more painful and degrading spectacle, to see the president fawning on the press or the press fawning on the president? But on this occasion one of the opening ''roasts'' was to be given by Mencken, and the reply delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Teachout supplies the sole published account of a Gridiron dinner that arouses in the reader an envious wish to have been present. Mencken began rather fatuously, as it reads to us now but would surely have seemed even then, by saying, ''Mr. President, Mr. Wright and fellow subjects of the Reich.'' He then delivered a fairly standard anti-New Deal diatribe, which not even his fans thought was up to his best. Taking his time to respond, F.D.R. offered some heavy and condescending flattery before describing the American journalistic profession, in sonorous sentences, as riddled with every kind of philistinism, ignorance and vulgarity. The entire passage was lifted directly from Mencken's own ''Prejudices.'' The trick brought down the house. And, where such a ruse would have caused Mark Twain to bellow with mirth at his own expense, it stung Mencken terribly. How and why was that?

When Roosevelt died, Mencken wrote in his diary that the president had possessed ''every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.'' How did one of America's seemingly great rationalists and modernists come to regard Roosevelt as more worthy of condemnation than Hitler? The answer, on the evidence of this and other studies, is that Mencken was a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, a childless hypochondriac with what seems on the evidence of these pages to have been a room-temperature libido, an antihumanist as much as an atheist, a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others and not as easy with the modern world and its many temptations and diversions as he liked it to be supposed.

Much of this we know from Mencken's own voluminous and self-regarding archive. Saved by his father's sudden death from a life apprenticeship to something like Dickens's blacking factory, he was shrewd and honest enough to admit that such an early bereavement had been a lucky deliverance: hence his impatience with sentimentality. Fortunate with one or two devoted early instructors, he could probably have been as good a musician as a writer but fell, as you have to fall yourself in order to understand it, hectically in love with the scribbler's trade. Raised in a regular and respectable part of a somewhat rackety town, Baltimore, he could cover scandals and fire and crime and (with especial and rather repellent insouciance) hangings of black men, in the confidence that a solid home and board, with mother and sisters, always awaited. Faced with the insipid Anglophilia of the day, he could respond -- thanks in part to the Saxony of his father and the Bavaria of his mother -- with a robust conviction that European culture did not stop at Calais.

His early attachment to Nietzsche, about whom in 1908 he wrote the first book ever published in the United States, has always seemed to me to be the essential bonding element in what would otherwise be his flagrant contradictions. Nietzsche despised both Christianity and democracy, as did Mencken. (I was much interested to learn from Teachout that Mencken seemingly never read Tocqueville, who gave a subtle account of the relation between religion and civic life in the United States.) But for Mencken, the German savant played approximately the same role as does Ayn Rand for some rancorous individualists of our own day. In the celebrated confrontation with William Jennings Bryan, for example, where the superstitious old populist feared that scientific Darwinism would open the door to social Darwinism, Mencken shared the same opinion but with more gusto. He truly believed that it was a waste of time and energy for the fit to succor the unfit. When he had written about Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 and entitled the essay ''The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,'' he had not attempted to be ironic or critical.

Admiration for a certain idea of Teutonism is also the only explanation for the exorbitant endorsements that he showered over the work of Theodore Dreiser. Even those who still admire ''Sister Carrie'' will find themselves straining to swallow Mencken's verdict on ''Jennie Gerhardt'' (''the best American novel I have ever read''), which for all its superiority he grandly allowed might still be inferior to ''Huckleberry Finn.'' Teachout, who edited ''A Second Mencken Chrestomathy,'' seems divided in his mind between a guarded admiration for Mencken's adventurous modernism -- which also included praise for Joseph Conrad and overpraise for Sinclair Lewis -- and a reverence for his innate conservatism. His subject's achievements as a disturber of the literary peace, he writes, ''loomed larger in 1914 than they do today, when the freedom of expression for which Mencken fought has come to be seen as a mixed blessing.'' As with his earlier reference to Paul de Man, one wants to ask, Come to be seen by whom?

Even if Mencken had not been a small-time admirer of Bismarck and the kaiser, he would have had every right to object to the abysmal chauvinism that was visited upon German-Americans after Woodrow Wilson's entry into World War I. This revolting episode in American history involved a good deal of academic and journalistic cowardice, with German literature courses banned on campus and German-sounding bylines purged from the press. Without demonstrating any outstanding courage in the face of this, Mencken simply retired his own name from the Baltimore papers, but one suspects that the experience engendered, or perhaps intensified, a lifelong bitterness. At any rate, something must explain the way in which the superficially debonair editor of The Smart Set so gravely hurt his gentle and indulgent patron, Alfred Knopf, by writing an exculpatory review of the first edition of ''Mein Kampf.''

Disclosures from the long-sealed Mencken archives in the past decade have aroused the usual ephemeral tempests about racism and sexism, and the usual evasive responses about the need to see these failings ''in context.'' Perhaps inadvertently, Teachout has persuaded me that the context was Mencken's own character. The contrast with Mark Twain is revealing at all points. I possess a recording of Mencken's only known radio interview, which he employed to attack the idea of radio in rather cranky and ponderous terms. It is difficult to imagine Huck's creator making such a paltry use of such a great opportunity, and it is impossible to picture him composing euphemisms about the Führer. As this century gets under way, it appears to me suddenly to leave the figure of Mencken decidedly shrunken and localized: a fate of which Terry Teachout seems queasily aware without being fully conscious of it.

Drawings (Gregory Nemec; Wesley Bedrosian)

Christopher Hitchens is a professor of liberal studies at the New School and a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book is ''Why Orwell Matters.''